Sam Bennett
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Okay, another bit of tongue-in-cheek comparing here. Last weekend I shot a Flyball Tournament in Chattanooga. It was a relatively small event and the light was relatively good, so I was able to squeeze in about 150 shots with the GF1 to get a feel for how it worked out for shooting action - something I know it really is not meant for.
So, these shots represent sort of the best comparison I can get with roughly the same subject (obviously the shots aren't identical, but this is about as close as you can get) in identical lighting conditions, etc.
100% crops of the two photos. Note that while the D700 shot says ISO 3200, its exposure was pulled down -1EV, so it's more representative of an ISO 1600 shot - the GF1 shot on the other hand, was shot at ISO 800 and adjust +0.5, so it's more like ISO 1200. Neither shot in the 100% crops have any NR whatsoever. Processed in Lightroom 2.5.
Optically and file wise, there's not much of a story to tell. The GF1 obviously is noisier, as one would expect. The D700's file are much, much cleaner, but all in all there's not a huge difference in the quality of each shot. Even stopped down, you can see that the DoF is deeper with the 20mm at f/1.7 than the 50mm at f/2.5. This actually works to my advantage here with this sort of work, because these shots are pre-focused, with me doing intelligent guesses about where the dog is going to cross the plane of focus at the time of exposure. The shallower the DoF, the more likely you are to miss the shot due to focus. On the flip side, the shallower the DoF the more likely you are to blur out extraneous junk around the dog.
But, the biggest problem really is timing. I got quite a few shots under my belt, and it was very, very difficult to consistently time the shot I wanted even at the end of the day. The shutter lag is different enough between the two cameras that you have to really think about how much you're going to anticipate the shot with the GF1. Every dog is a bit different in the way in which they approach the box, so even if you've re-wired your brain enough to get one dog, there's no guarantee about the next one. The D700 on the other hand feels like an extension of my brain at this point - if I see the shot with the D700, I got it. If I see the shot on the GF1, I missed it - by a long shot. My approach to getting these shots was to use the LCD as a general guide for framing, but to completely disregard it in terms of timing. I would actually stand up and have the GF1 far below me to form sort of a "tripod", following the dog in a consistent sweep - easy on the back, but not great for keeper ratios.
The bottom line for me is that there's no way I would use the GF1 as my second camera. Before selling my D700 backup, I would work with one D700+Grip+70-200/2.8, and then a D700+50mm with no grip on my "hip holster" for these sort of shots, and miscellaneous shooting around the ring. It's a perfect setup because there's absolutely no re-adjusting that needs to be done between the two cameras. The only difference really is the FPS - in all other regards it "feels" like you're shooting with the same camera and you can continue timing shots confidently. Using the GF1 would mean totally adjusting my technique when I went down to that camera, and then adjusting the other way going back to the D700, which just ain't gonna work.
So, no real surprises here. Image-quality wise, I sold a few prints with the GF1 and they looked fine. But my keeper ratio sucked, so the GF1 will stay in the bag for these events. It shouldn't feel too bad, the D700 stays in a case most of the rest of the time. 
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